BETH NAKAMURA/THE OREGONIANJean M. Auel in the study of her Southwest Portland condo.

When Jean M. Auel started writing "The Clan of the Cave Bear" more than 30 years ago, she didn't have a desk of her own. Auel wrote on a typewriter at the kitchen table and folded out one of the leaves when the family sat down to dinner. Her three daughters were away at college, but her two sons were at home and got used to the clutter of books from the library and the sound of their mother typing deep into the night.

Today the view from Auel's desk is spectacular. Downtown Portland spreads northeast toward the Columbia River and the Cascade peaks on the horizon including, on a clear day, Mount Rainier. Auel is still surrounded by art and books and photographs, but it's a higher grade of clutter, one that reflects the adventures of one of the most popular authors in the country.

Around her work space, near the photos of her 15 grandchildren, are stacks of foreign editions of the five previous novels in her Earth's Children series, which has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide. One wall is dominated by a library of books about archaeology and prehistory, another has original art from her book jackets and the honorary degrees she's received.

Auel has funny, casual stories about everything and is just as happy to show off the replica of a Neanderthal skull her children gave her for Christmas ("He had quite a schnoz") as talk about famous people ("I had a meeting with Hillary in the White House").

In the next room, the pool table is covered with stacks of advance copies of "The Land of Painted Caves," the final volume in the series that started with "The Clan of the Cave Bear." It'll be published simultaneously in 17 countries on Tuesday, and the story of Ayla, the beautiful Cro-Magnon orphan raised by Neanderthals, will come to an end.

Auel is 75 and says she hasn't really accepted that her life's work could be over as well.

Maybe after the book is published and all the publicity ends, maybe then she'll "start crying, or whatever I'm going to do." Right now, though, she's on what to her is an odd schedule that has nothing to do with jet lag from a recent trip to London. Because of obligations connected to the release of "The Land of Painted Caves" -- a book tour, lots of interviews with blogs that didn't exist when her last book, "The Shelters of Stone," was published nine years ago -- Auel has been getting up in the morning and going to bed at night. She doesn't like it.

"I'm a Night Auel, with my last name being pronounced like that," she says.

All her life, even when she was raising five children, working full-time at Tektronix and taking night classes at the University of Portland, Auel has had to force herself to be active in the morning. When she became obsessed with Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and brought armloads of books home from the Multnomah County Central Library, it was a decision to stay up late that changed her life.

"When I first started," Auel says, "I got this idea about a girl who was going to live with some people who were different. (Her husband) said, 'Come on to bed' and I said, 'Wait a minute, I've got an idea and I want to see if I can write it.' I wrote it right out and started it that way."

It was 1977, and Auel was obsessed. She'd quit her job at Tektronix to get a master's in business administration and turned down a well-paying job as a bank manager to see if she could write a novel. She worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and wrote half a million words, an outline for the entire series.

Auel met her agent, Jean Naggar, at the Willamette Writers conference and in 1980, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" sold for $130,000, a record for a first novel. Two years later, "The Valley of Horses" sold more than 5 million copies in hardcover and was the punch line in a Peanuts comic strip that hangs in Auel's office. All of her books after "The Clan of the Cave Bear" have been No. 1 best-sellers on The New York Times list. She's been published in 35 languages and is particularly popular in Europe, where her sales equal those in the U.S.

In some ways, Auel's career is similar to J.K. Rowling's. Both were unknown and unpublished when they wrote their first book, with no one knowing or caring about a girl named Ayla or a boy named Harry Potter. As the series exploded in popularity, they wrote with the world looking over their shoulders and stayed true to the vision they had at the beginning. It's not easy to write under pressure, as money and fame lead to new demands, but Auel says she never had a problem blocking it all out and writing after her husband, Ray Auel, went to bed.

"I write for myself," she says. "I don't write for my publisher. I don't write for critics. I don't write for my fans. I know some fans would wish I would write for them, but I don't. It's my book. It's my story. It's my characters."

Auel writes on a computer that has a large monitor but does not have email or Web access. She starts about 11:30 p.m., after she watches the news with Ray and he goes to bed, and works for at least three or four hours, sometimes until the sun is up. She adjusts the blinds in her office to let in more or less light, and isn't worried about working alone in a huge condominium. When the night's work is done, she goes to bed and gets up around 2 p.m. to spend the afternoon and evening with her husband before starting to work again.

BETH NAKAMURA/THE OREGONIANJean M. Auel holds a drawing of her character Ayla made by a sketch artist who works with the police in London and asked her fans to describe Ayla.

Writing is the hardest work Auel has ever done. Harder than raising five children while designing circuit boards at Tektronix and going to college, harder than anything. Success came so fast that there was no time to question it, and no answer when she did stop and wonder why this was happening to her.

"I really don't know," Auel says, throwing her hands in the air. "Maybe it's that it's all our beginnings. Maybe I wrote a good story. I don't know. I'm delighted, I couldn't be happier, but then when somebody says, 'I don't like that,' I say, 'Well, that's too bad.' You're not going to please everybody."

The Auels live a good life. There's a beautiful beach house at Arch Cape and frequent trips abroad for research and pleasure. They've been in all the caves she's written about except one and enjoyed friendships with leading academics who've been charmed by a bright, curious woman with a down-to-earth manner and a sincere interest in the latest science. Auel has always written about interbreeding between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon as if it were a given, and recent genetic testing backs her up.

"I love it," she says, laughing. "My daughter was going through some old files and she found this interview I gave when the first book came out in 1980. I said, 'I think all of us have a little Neanderthal in us.' You get together, you meet each other, genes are going to get exchanged."

After the serious money started coming in, the Auels built a house on Parrot Mountain that had everything: 50 acres, a swimming pool, a tennis court, "all the goodies," she says. "But the trouble is, when you have all those goodies, something's always going wrong, and it's my husband who has to fix it. I think he was just getting tired of it."

Eleven years ago, they bought an entire floor in a condominium building in Goose Hollow and combined three units into about 6,000 square feet of living space crammed with art and books. The elevator opens into the unit, a common feature on Central Park West but not often seen in Portland. There is art of every kind -- a room of beautiful Inuit paintings, modern work by Lillian Pitt and Lucinda Parker and Melinda Thorsnes, a portrait of the Auels by Henk Pander, whose wife Delores Pander was Jean Auel's secretary and friend for many years before her death last year.

BETH NAKAMURA/THE OREGONIANA painting of one of the famous horses found on the Lascaux cave in France hangs above the fireplace in Auel's study. Her collection of bears and lions sits on the mantel.

"I collect art," Auel says. "That's my weakness. I keep saying, 'We've got to put a moratorium on it, we don't have room,' but I keep buying it. Some of it is in other parts of this building, in the lobby, out in the hallways. And then the beach (house) is full of art ... I feel so lucky that I can do this. We started collecting art when we first got married. We just couldn't get much stuff."

The cover of "The Land of Painted Caves" shows Ayla looking down from the rim of a cave at a river valley where horses graze in a meadow. It wraps around the spine to a bright fire in the back of the cave, a typical design Auel loves. She also loves that her picture has never been on the front or back cover, and that compared to her peers, Stephen King or Danielle Steel or Mary Higgins Clark, she can walk down any street without being recognized.

"I don't want to be known for my face," Auel says. "I want to be known for my work." She describes a recent photography session at a London museum as "a paparazzi event" and laughs loudly at the memory.

"A 75-year-old fat lady and they wanted to do paparazzi pictures."

The Earth's Children series is finished, but Auel has been hedging about whether "The Land of Painted Caves" is the last book. There's more in the outline that has guided her all these years, and she can't stand the thought of living without Ayla. She has ideas -- a children's book set in France, something about the beginnings of agriculture -- and is helping her children prepare to run what she calls the family business. Her daughter Lenore is her secretary, and e-book deals and movie rights could keep everyone busy for another generation or two.

"They're going to have to take over at some point," she says.

Auel stops in front of her newest acquisition, a Russian Expressionist portrait she picked up at a gallery in Park City, Utah. She doesn't know much about the artist but admired the tough, rugged profile of an older woman.

"That woman has lived a life and she hasn't given up," Auel says. "I just love it. She just looks so strong."